In February 2012, the Israeli Labor Federation, the Histadrut, led a general strike of organized workers who struck for the benefit of unorganized exploited subcontracted workers. The struggle culminated in an agreement of employers to directly employ thousands of bank tellers, production line workers, hotel housekeepers, warehouse workers, and other subcontracted workers and for these workers to be fully covered by Histadrut collective bargaining agreements. If directly employed workers tried that tactic here in the U.S. they could all be permanently replaced by subcontracted workers.We will discuss the struggle to end exploitative subcontracting and its implications for workers in Israel and the United States.

Ross Hyman is a researcher and community organizer with the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the labor union federation in the United States. He is a co-founder, with Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, of the Shomer Shalom Institute for Jewish Nonviolence. He has a Ph.d in physics.